WESTERN
Definitions of Atheism
Algirdas Julien Greimas, on semantics
"It was not a simple matter, and Michel had spent a fair amount of time at his
computer screen sketching one kind of combinatoire after another, using the two
different systems as the x and y axes of several different grids, none of which
told him much. But then he began moving the four terms around the inital points
of a Greimas semantic rectangle, a structuralist schema with alchemical ancestry,
which proposed that no simple dialectic was enough to indicate the true
complexity of any cluster of related concepts, so that it was necessary to
acknowledge the real difference between something's oppsite and its contrary; the
concept "not-X" being not quite the same thing as "anti-X," as one saw
immediately.
Thus -S was a simple not-S, and S [with a line over it] was the stronger anti-S;
while -S [with a line over it] was the for Michel skullcracking negation of a
negation, either a neutralizing of the initial opposition, or the union of the
two negations; in practice this often remained a mystery or koan, but sometimes
it came clear ..."
-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars 1993 pp 196-7
"... the man who elaborated a complete theory of narrative structures was
Algirdas Julien Greimas. His theory, propounded and modified by several steps
(Sémantique Structurale 1966, Du sens 1970, Les
actants, les acteurs et les figures 1973, Entretien avec
A J Greimas sur les structures é lémentaires de la signification
by Frédéric Nef,1976) has now obtained
fairly wide acceptance, at least among writers on drama and theatre ..."
"A Grammar of Narrativity: Algirdas Julien Greimas" by Wanda Rulewicz
an application of the Greimas' semantic rectangle
to the subject [S] of theism and
its three (at least) counter-subjects.
In this application, theism is taken as the socially established "allowed" thesis
from which are derived its oppositions: not-theism, anti-theism, and
not-anti-theism. All three oppositions are manifest in contemporary
euro-american Christian society:
not theism | not allowed | monisms: Daoism, Buddhism, Humanism, Unitarian Universalism |
anti-theism | forbidden | American Atheists, Inc. |
not anti-theism | neither forbidden nor not allowed |
Jewish, Christian, Muslim atheism |
--tpk 1993/1998
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